The relationship
between philosophy and architecture not only works to position one in relation
to the other, it also opens up the possibility that one may already be figuring
in and thus would already be present within the other. It may be, for example,
that architecture is already at work in the structuration of its own presence
within philosophical texts. [1] With Deleuze's Le Pli[2]
something else is being brought into consideration. Here there is another philosophical
possibility. More exactly, however, it has, in part, already been brought in,
and therefore the fold--also le pli --is already present in contemporary
architectural theory and practice. [3]
With this presence questions rise. What is it that is present? How is the practice
to be understood? Is this a case of architecture's adoption (and therefore adaptation)
of the philosophical? Within each of the questions there endures the further
question of the nature of the relation that links architecture and philosophy.
Relation is from the start ineliminably present, and it is the precise nature
of this presence--its being present--that will demand to be thought.

Questioning
here can always proliferate and yet within the proliferation what is maintained
is the necessity to take up the fold's own architecture. In other words what
has to be given a specific place is the possibility of the site as being that
which may come to be architectural. (One difficulty here, though it is a difficulty
with far greater extension, is in giving architecture, and with the architectural,
sufficient specificity.) Working with this text--to begin with Deleuze's text
Le Pli --and thus tracing its own architectural implications will entail
following a two-fold strategy. In the first place there must be the sustained
attempt to extract that which is present in Deleuze's formulation--reformulation
perhaps--of Leibniz's philosophy that allows for architecture, and in the
second there will be the attempt to locate that strategy within what can be
called architecture's opening. There different moments will continue to intersect
and, in intersecting, in their movement backwards and forwards, they will
have the effect of diminishing, and finally obviating ,the hold of prediction.
With the abeyance of prediction chance may play a constitutive role. It will
have a chance, finally.

In order to
begin, a prevarication may be necessary. However, what this prevaricatory
move will involve is a redirection in which, if only momentarily, philosophy
returns to itself. It will not be a recovery--for nothing has been lost, there
will never have been an original saying--but a return that sunders any real
possibility of giving this 'itself' an essential and thus unified statue.
In the place of the substantive--philosophy as having an essence that can
be stated as such, even stated within an attempt to reground or regroup essential
thinking--there will be the actative. In other words what will be essential
is an activity, one which is necessarily conflictual, and one which therefore
resists the essential. What this gives rise to is an opening in which any
turning back has to be rethought as a repetition that can never master of
determine itself. (Completion only endures as part of a metaphysical and in
the end nihilistic fantasy.) Philosophy is originally, thus, the locus of
an enacted conflict and therefore it will always have to be taken as originally
complex. [4] Moreover, and as a continuing part of that resistance,
the history of philosophy can be rewritten in terms of the affirmation and
forgetting of the effective presence of anoriginal complexity.

Here this will
mean that the project announced in Deleuze's Le Pli can be taken as
part of a wider and perhaps more generalizable possibility within, and thus
for, philosophy (a possibility effaced once it begins to form part of the
fetishism of the proper name). In recognizing this as an opening, what, consequentially,
then come to be sanctioned are differing movements, moments in which critique
and the advent of the philosophical take place. Instead of enacting the modernist
fantasy, one which is already inscribed as much in philosophical texts as
in architectural programs, of the absolutely new beginning--the radical and
complete differentiation, metaphysical destruction--what emerges as central
is relation. The actual meaning of relation is of fundamental importance.
Two elements need to be noted here.

In the first
place, relation involves the recognition that what cannot be precluded are
connections and interconnections. There can be no absolute differentiation.
The recognition of the primordiality of relation is evident, for example,
in Walter Benjamin's assertion that what cannot be eliminated from either
the object of interpretation or the historical object is the possibility of
their having an 'afterlife' (Nachleben). Indeed it can be argued further
that the ineliminable linking of 'life ' and 'afterlife' is a specific thinking
of relation. [5]

Benjamin's
is a position--a position allowing for a type of generality--that seeks to
maintain the primordiality of relation while holding to its centrality beyond
the conception of historical totality that is at work within the Hegelian
tradition. Both Benjamin and Deleuze can, in this sense therefore, be read
as part of that generalizable move (a move amounting to another possibility
for philosophy, though equally another possibility for architecture). In the
second place, and more specifically, Deleuze's work on Leibniz can itself
be taken as a thinking of relation. The fold is a relation. Indeed, its being
a relation will allow for the question of how apposite a thinking of relation
it is. The question of how apposite this may be as a thinking of relation
is itself given within the bounds set by the incorporation of critique into
this particular advent of the philosophical. Furthermore the possibility of
there being an inherent division within relation would work to indicate that
relation, both as a term and as strategy, resists the hold of essentialism.
Essentialism would entail a simple formalism that takes relation as a given,
and as such would deny the inherent plurality within relation itself. Replacing
the essential and the formal will allow for unpredictable relations.

Deleuze's reading
of Leibniz not only links Leibniz to a divergent tradition that has always
maintained the centrality of the multiple---thereby implicating his (Deleuze's)
own project in that tradition--but goes a step further by identifying the
conditions in which 'we' (nous) are found as in some already described
or identified by the process at work in Leibniz's philosophical writings.
Leibniz emerges therefore as a philosopher for modernity. This will not be
a Leibniz read within the will to truth but a Leibniz whose work is allowed
to connect. One which therefore, following Deleuze's own precepts, is given
space: 'We remain Leibnizian, even though it is no longer the accords which
express our world or our text. We discover new ways of folding as new envelopes,
but remain Leibnizian because it is always a question of folding, unfolding,
refolding [parce qui'il s'agit toujours de plier, déplier, replier
]'. (p. 189)

It is the commitment
advanced in this passage that maintains the critical dimension within the
reading of Leibniz. (Critique is a relation which is inextricably linked to
the need for judgement arising out of the impossibility of a universalizing
synthesis.) What this passage also introduces, and it is a theme whose introduction
will be central to any undertaking concerning either Le Pli or more
generally philosophy's other possibility, is time. If it is 'always a question
of folding, unfolding, refolding', then how is this 'always' (toujours)
to be understood? Not only is there the commitment to this as a description
of activity in general--perhaps a Deleuzian De rerum natura --it will
be with this repetition that time will insist. Here specifically the question
will concern the time of this 'always'. It should not be thought that this
word provides no more than a trivial addition. In allowing for a certain flexibility
within translation, it can be argued that the 'same' possibility is also at
work in the important philosophical confrontation between Plato and Heraclitus.
It is a confrontation--one, given its translation, that sets the limits of
philosophical modernity--in which not only does time figure, but more emphatically
time will provide the actual possibility of confrontation itself. This is,
of course, a time that is necessarily interarticulated with modes of existence.
Time and existence, while always plural, are nonetheless made all one word
necessarily inter-connected.

Heraclitus,
according to Aristotle, describes the soul as reon aei (always flowing).
[6] Moreover, in the Cratylus Plato describes the essential being
(ousia) of the form; the specific instance is 'beauty', as being of
necessity, aei estin oion estin (always the same as itself) (439d).
The term 'always' (aei) figures twice. And yet what the same word designates
is two fundamentally different ontological and temporal set-ups. On the other
hand the Platonic demands an ontology of statis in which the problem of presentation
is fundamental and which works therefore to determine the productive limits
of the system. Moreover what is unthinkable in Platonic terms is the co-presence
of instantiation and becoming. And yet it is precisely this possibility that
characterizes the Heraclitean formulation. For Heraclitus presentation is
not precluded by an ontology and temporality of becoming. What needs to be
added, though this will be an addition that takes Heraclitean concerns beyond
the range of the fragments, is that what has the quality of the Heraclitean
'always' is not located within the general frame of representation, and therefore
the issue is not whether or not it is possible to represent the all--that
which is given to be represented--in its totality. It is a general description
of a fundamental ontological and temporal condition. It is possible to suggest
that when Leibniz defines the monad in terms of force and then goes on to
establish a distinction between the form taken by a monad at a specific instance--the
monad's 'perception'--and the monad's own substantial presence defined in
terms of 'force' (vis) what is being rehearsed is precisely the ontological
and temporal possibilities that inhere in Heraclitus. A similar state of affairs
also pertains to the nature of the distinction between 'appetition' and 'perception'
(compare Monadology 15). [7]

In sum, what
continues to be present in Heraclitus and in Leibniz, present in contradistinction
to the Platonic heritage, is the possibility of the initial--thus anoriginal--co-presence
of that which is ontologically and temporally different. (Reworked, it is,
or course, this possibility that Deleuze finds in Leibniz.) Moreover it is
a co-presence that opens up the possibility of another take on complexity--that
is, an approach to complexity in which the complex depends upon ontological
and temporal difference. Returning to the theme of representation, what this
means here is more significant than the melancholic celebration of the negative.
In other words, there is no inherent limit within representation to which
allusion is being made. It is not a question of a grounding impossibility--an
ineliminable negativity--determining thought and action; at work here is a
different possibility. This other presentation of the impossibility of representation
should be linked to time. In other words, all that there could be is not present
and thus not given in one and the same moment to be represented. Again this
should not be taken as the negative--a type of presentational via negativa
--but rather a distancing from the evocation of presence that is demanded
by the posited, even if already putative, coextensivity between form and function.
This coextensivity--a set-up inhabiting both philosophy and architecture--is
important because of its temporality. What it presupposes is that all that
will have happened will have taken place in one and the same time; what is
given is given once and for all. However, with the possibility mooted here
there is a different regime of time. Initially it works within the opening
of the intended coextensivity of form and function, a coextensivity which
while definitional of certain modernism is also there throughout architecture's
history as characterizing the building's 'arrangement'. Furthermore it is
the reworking of this coextensivity--a reworking in which function is retained
while the necessity of its expression is held open--that marks what has been
identified above as architecture's opening. Moreover this opening will eschew
a simple displaying and confusing of styles; such a manoeuvre would in the
end amount to the ornamentalization of ornament. The jumbling of genre and
style leading to style's indifferent relation to function while including
what was identified as the ornamentalization of ornament also needs to be
understood as involving time. Time, the time of the architectural post-modern,
involves a progress in which nothing occurs or changes presented within the
temporality of fashion. Here, in contradistinction to the temporality of the
post-modern, there is the affirmation of a different temporal scheme: another
regime.

It is this different
regime of time that, it can be argued, is discovered by Deleuze, for example,
in his treatment of the Leibnizian infinite. The link between the Baroque
and the infinite plays a significant role in Deleuze's reading. He takes considerable
care, quite rightly, in distinguishing between the Cartesian and the Leibnizian
philosophical positions. What is fundamental to the Leibnizian is the nature
of the co-presence of the finite and the infinite: 'The actual infinite in
the finite ego [moi], this is exactly the position of equilibrium,
or disequilibrium, of the Baroque.' (p. 119)

Again, a similar
structure of thought--a structure marking out the co-presence of the different--will
be identified by Deleuze in the discussion of the monads. Furthermore it is
also there in the deployment of the[[dotaccent]] language of architecture
in his reformulation of what is taken to be the Baroque structure of Leibniz's
text Essais de Théodicé. Deleuze identifies it as a text
which responds, par excellence, to the general criteria of the Baroque narrative
[récit]' (p. 82). He then goes on to describe the text in the
following terms: 'It is an architectural dream; an immense pyramid which has
a summit, but no base and is constituted of an infinite number of apartments
of which each one is a world.' (p. 82)

In broad terms
that which can be drawn from these differing formulations is the co-presence
of infinite and the finite, the limited and the unlimited, as well as how
their insistent presence is to be understood philosophically and architecturally.
It is this possibility that is also at play in the description of the fold.
However, not only is there this co-presence, there is in addition the image
of complexity. Complexity is the fold that as it is unfolded opens up further
folds, which in being unfolded reveal further folds. What this means is that
there can be no real beginning and, usually, no real end. The nature of inside
and outside is recast by the complex fold. And yet of course within the movement
there are real states. Static actual existence is not precluded; rather, it
is to be thought as an interruption and thus as an eruption out of movement.
In emerging, the static--the actual--reveals, allows itself to be uncanny,
by enjoining new relations. The position of a necessary complexity works to
reposition the Leibnizian conception of complexity as fundamentally removed
from the Cartesian. The nature of the divide between them must resist the
easy conflation often provided by the complacency of history within which
Descartes and Leibniz are equated and linked by virtue of their forming part
of the Rationalist philosophical movement.

For Descartes
the complex consisted of an amalgam of simples. (A 'simple', for Descartes,
is the object of 'clear and distinct perception'. It is therefore a posited
entity that is absolutely self-referential and admits of no further reductions.
The geometrical equivalent is the axiom.) The Cartesian complex therefore
could always be reduced to its constitutive parts and by regenerating the
complex it could be understood. Understood totally in its totality and thus
able to be represented as such. It is self-evident that the Cartesian construal
of the relationship between the simple and the complex is structured by its
being articulated within the problematic of representation. Nonetheless, the
important point here is time. All that is there to be given, thus all that
comprises the complex, is given at one and the same time. While the complex
may not be able to be comprehended in one moment, it is nonetheless complete
in its enactment; it is enacted completely. The reduction of the complex to
its constitutive parts is a movement which, in Cartesian terms, has no effects.
In other words, further complications are not added in the act of reduction.
Here is the contrast. The Leibnizian conception must involve that which can
never be absolutely unfolded since the monad unfolds infinitely. The infinite
and the finite are co-present in their difference and thus allow a joining-up
that can never be reduced to a particular form at the present. The impossibility
of this reduction occurs because what it is that is present comprises two
different temporal orders, each with its own possibilities. Prior to returning,
albeit briefly, to this two-fold temporal order it is vital to take up what
has already been identified as architecture's opening.

The initial
and disruptive element of this opening is, ironically, its conserving nature.
What is held in place--though it is a holding that may allow what is held
to be questioned--is function. The nature of the function is questioned and
possibilities opened up which were not hitherto accessible, by allowing the
necessity of a specific enactment to be held in abeyance. And with it in holding
to the specific function as a question, the process and thus the disruptive
continuity of questioning is maintained. Opening the relationship between
form and function gives rise to a specific and strategic question. If the
link loses its coextensivity what, then, will be at work in the opening? It
is thus that the question of how the relation between form and function is
to be taken, and enacted, arises. It is a question that defies the teleology
and the temporality of prediction. With the abeyance of prediction and thus
with the absence of a necessary relation between form and function chance
will come to figure. The necessary retention of a commitment to a form of
function--a form that in functioning questions the nature of that function--precludes
the utopian while maintaining architecture's critical dimension. In the practice
of contemporary architecture the fold has found a place in that opening. In
writing about Eisenman's Rebstockpark project--a project deploying folding--John
Rajchman notes: 'In Eisenman's words: " one must make present in a space its
implicit 'weakness' or its 'potential' for reframing". The principles of his
perplication are then that there is no place and no space that is not somewhat
"weak" in this sense, and "weakness" is imperceptible prior to the point of
view that one normally has of the space or the place. [8]

Time and the
fold can therefore be taken as working together in the question. The question,
however, is linked to the function. It is the necessary ground of questioning.
Libeskind's extension to the Jewish Museum, while not taking up the fold as
such, utilized the structure of a question, indeed a plurality of questions.
The questions that endure concern the presence of absence, presenting that
which resists representation, Berlin's own relation to a now past Jewish presence
within it; other questions are possible. The questions, rather than ornamentalizing
the building, to be seen as additions, façades, etc., can be taken
to provide the building's actual structuration. The structuration enacts questioning
by resisting any provision of definite answers, while at the same time maintaining,
in a questioned form, the possibility of representation, display and thus
the work--a work reworked--of the museum. Its being this complex and thus
its having this complexity occur at the same time. At the same time therefore
it resolves and does not resolve. At the same time therefore it is both finite
and infinite. It is precisely this possibility that Deleuze has identified
in Leibniz as a possibility for philosophy in which ontology and the question
remain as central and which architects have used--though it can always be
achieved in other ways--to inscribe the time of questioning into the fabric
of the building. It will be the inscription of time that will sanction, on
the one hand, the use of different geometric configuration, while on the other
it will link the presence of the building to another conception of the present.
In other words, allowing time the priority usually accorded to space will
cause both the building and the historical space (thus the historical time)
it inhabits to be rethought. This rethinking will, in turn, demand those philosophical
adventures which are, in part, at work in Deleuze's Le Pli .

The final question
that must be considered is where this situation leaves architecture's relation
to philosophy. Again, it may be that the ultimate point of connection is that
both work to conserve. Architecture, in order to endure as itself, must work
to house and thus to shelter. What this means is that architecture cannot
be conflated with its language--present as architectural images or metaphors
within philosophical or theoretical texts; it must have form. Accepting this
necessity, architecture's inescapable constraint, need not close down the
question of form. Form, however, will always be mediated by the immediate
specificity of function. Neither function nor housing nor shelter can be raised
as though they exist in themselves. The presentation of function --its being
housed in a certain way--is always inscribed within a network, of values and
relations of power. This network has a mediating connection to form, since
it will always come to be articulated by the form itself. In other words what
is at work here is the complex interconnexion that conserves architecture--allows
for the repetition of its telos --while accounting for the form of
its presence. The same presentational procedures also mark the philosophical.
A specific conclusion can be drawn from this state of affairs. In taking up
architecture from within the self-conserving place of philosophy, and in architecture's
own work with philosophy, it is the conflation of practice with language that
will need to be examined. While not denying he materiality of language it
remains the case that the materiality of architecture and thus its mode of
being present are different. While both philosophy and architecture are inextricably
bound up with those constraints that hold and thus conserve the specificity
of each, their concrete determinations drive them apart. And yet while they
are apart-- distinct from each other--they can come to be linked, and therefore
in the link they both form a part of a similar mode of thinking, since each
will sanction a critical stand that is constrained to work while holding to
the identity in question. The interplay of apart/a part means that running
through both philosophy and architecture is the centrality of time. Initially,
time is the repetition of the same, a repetition which, while conserving,
sets up the site of an intervention in terms of which what will come to be
repeated will be that which occurs again for the first time, an occurrence
which brings another time into play. This latter determination figures both
within and as the concrete instantiation of questioning.

In moving between
philosophy and architecture they remain apart and as a part of the complex
work of repetition. The logic of apart/ a part, its being at work simultaneously
in all its aspects, is, here, architecture's change. The work of this logic
is not the hinge of oscillation; it is the infinite folded into the finite:
the fold is opening.

NOTES

1. This paper
is adapted from a work in progress--Ornament and Space: Relating Philosophy
and Architecture -- to be published by Edinburgh University Press. Part
of the book will involve a detailed treatment of Mark Wigley's arguments concerning
the relation between architecture and philosophy. Wigley's formulation of
the architecture/philosophy relation figures in those opening questions and
formulations.

2. Gilles Deleuze,
Le Pli (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991). In subsequent references
to this work, the page reference is given in the text.

4. The following
discussion presents in truncated form some of the arguments I have developed
in far greater detail in The Plural Event (London: Routledge,
1993). An important part of the strategy there, as here, is to give this original
complexity an ontological formulation. The point of such an undertaking is
to indicate that the complexity in question does not involve an amalgam of
simples that could ever be further reduced, but rather that there is complexity
ab initio . In order to identify this other origin the term 'anoriginal'
has been used. In sum, what it seeks to name is this complex possibility.

5. I have tried
to develop this aspect of Benjamin's work in 'Time and Task: Benjamin and
Heidegger on the Present', in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy, edited
by A. Benjamin and P. Osborne (London: Routledge, 1993).

6. I have tried
to develop this interpretation of Heraclitus in 'Time and Interpretation in
Heraclitus', in Post Structuralist Classics , edited by A. Benjamin
(London: Routledge, 1988).

7. See the discussion
of Leibniz in The Plural Event.

8. John Rajchman,
'Perplications: On the Space and Time of Rebstockpark', in Unfolding Frankfurt
(Frankfurt: Ernst & Sohn, 1992), p. 36. Rajchman's is by far the most
philosophically acute description of this project.